By PAULA NECHAK, SPECIAL TO THE P-I

Published 10:00 pm, Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Kit Kittredge (Abigail Breslin) is one plucky, lucky 10-year-old girl. She lives in an upscale Cincinnati neighborhood, has a mom (Julia Ormond) who puts June Cleaver to shame with her homemaking skills and sex appeal, and a dad (Chris O'Donnell) who is as hard-working and dedicated to his family as they come.

Kit's dream is to be a reporter for the Cincinnati Register, a desire she acts upon by marching intrepidly into the editor's office with a story typed on her trusty (if sticky) Royal, sure she'll be "going inside as a visitor and coming out a journalist."

But there is a dark cloud moving over her childhood idyll of treehouses and good grades -- one that has the entire country in its grip. It's 1934, after all, and the Great Depression is destroying lives and families and forcing previously solvent souls to sell eggs to survive or ride the rails in search of a job.

Kit has empathy for her school chums who move away or are relegated to hobo communities when no work comes, but when she volunteers at a local soup kitchen and finds her dad (Chris O'Donnell) among its recipients, her world crumbles and she must learn to not "let it beat you," as her dad tells her.

When Dad goes to New York to look for work, Kit's mom is reduced to renting out the house to an odd panoply of boarders -- prim Mrs. Howard (Glenne Headly), goofy mobile librarian Miss Bond (Joan Cusack), magician Mr. Berk (Stanley Tucci) and dancer Miss Dooley (Jane Krakowski) -- in order to stave off their own inevitable foreclosure. And when mysterious robberies occur and a pair of transient hobos who are helping around the Kittredge house are blamed, Kit and her friends rally to crack the case.

The Kit Kittredge series of books that are the origin of the phenomenon called the American Girl doll franchise is a rite of passage for preteen girls and its commercial success is oddly in direct opposition to a film that eschews such modest values.

Written by Ann Peacock -- the screenwriter of the stupendously successful "Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" -- and even executive produced by Julia Roberts, "Kit Kittredge" could be primed for a series of sequels, yet as directed by Patricia Rozema ("Mansfield Park"), its elemental integrity seems in direct opposition to the blockbuster- or sequel-mania that fuels Hollywood.

Rozema throws us into a world where, though foreclosure signs are pounded into lawns, hobos have more principles than those who have not suffered any loss of home and family, and are trusted with the care of cast-off children. It's a sanitized paradise, shot in warm sepia and gold, that actually feels good in our current day of violence, Amber alerts and chaos.

It's an unashamedly old-fashioned and richly visualized evocation of a time when values were key, trust in your neighbor complete, and a way of life that should be simple is made unfathomably complex because of economic hardship.

The film's idealization of what was ostensibly a terrible time in history is where it most falters: It can't quite decide whether it wants to be a mystery or a heartfelt family drama, sometimes moves at a snail's pace and is undeniably predictable. But these faults are outweighed by a strength of character and the fact that it's been made for an ignored audience -- girls between 10 and 13 -- at whom movies are rarely ever targeted.